


An unhealthy attachment

by rivkat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Purgatory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-23
Updated: 2012-06-23
Packaged: 2017-11-08 09:46:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/441872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivkat/pseuds/rivkat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the prompt: waking up hungover in an unknown place.  The Catholic Catechism describes Purgatory as a way to purify a soul from “an unhealthy attachment to creatures.”  Sam and Dean don’t necessarily see it that way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An unhealthy attachment

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by giandujakiss.

“Fuck me, not again!”

The unfamiliar voice felt like an insect burrowing into Sam’s brain. His _eyebrows_ hurt. He was lying on what felt like sticks and mud. The only thing that wasn’t painful was the light: no morning glare threatening to burn out his hungover eyes.

“Hey, asshole.” A foot prodded him in the side, ungently.

Sam rolled over and threw up.

He was a little unclear on the sequence of events after, but even over the pounding of his head he became aware that he was being dragged somewhere by two men. “—know how he gets,” one said, and then it felt like a pair of cymbals slammed together right by his ear, and Sam picked the other one back up with “—see what he’ll do to this one. Learned some new tricks last time.”

There was something wrong with the light.

Sam blinked and tried to raise his head. He wasn’t in any condition to fight these guys, and he knew that was weird—he was a Winchester; even 100 proof he should’ve been able to get away. But every muscle ached like he’d been used as a flyswatter by an anxious giant, and things were moving at the edges of his barely-there vision.

“Winchester!” 

Again, what the actual fuck? The guy was yelling in his ear, but not _at_ \--

“Aw, fuck,” Dean said, disgusted, and Sam passed out again.

****

He was tied to a chair. Good and tied, the kind that needed serious time and ideally a blade or an accomplice to get out of. He swallowed experimentally and didn’t gag, though his mouth felt like a midsummer dumpster.

When he raised his head, Dean was there, posed so perfectly Sam might’ve just imagined him: leaning back against a table with one ankle crossed over the other, arms folded, sleeves of his workshirt rolled up, head tilted as he waited for Sam to finish his examination.

“I got no problem cutting up things wearing Sam’s face,” Dean said when their eyes met. “If you know everything Sam knows, you must know that.”

Okay: in Purgatory, not out, and also in trouble. Sam didn’t try to hide the joy on his face. “It’s _me_. I’ve been trying to get you out for _months_ , you and Castiel both, after you disappeared when Dick—”

Dean picked up a blade as nearly as long as his forearm. The light glinted off it in a way somehow both greasy and slick. “All that means is you had a tangle with Sam after Dick kicked it. Or maybe you’ve just been talking to the locals. Not like I’d know if you were the asshole from St. Louis or the one from Milwaukee.”

“Retinal flare!” Sam said, because Dean sometimes let his ‘I’m just a dumb grunt’ act creep into his head, and he didn’t really want to be tortured, not least because of how bad Dean would feel afterwards and how badly he’d hide that. Though mostly Sam didn’t want to see Dean’s skills from this side of the ropes.

Dean scoffed. “Dude, you see any fucking _cameras_ here?” Sam looked more carefully around the room, and true enough it did look a bit preindustrial; even Dean’s big old knife could well have been hand-forged.

“You don’t need cameras to test for retinal flare,” Sam argued, hoping it was true. “Just a lens, hand ground even.” It stood to reason, anyway. 

Dean pushed himself away from the table, the knife casually left there along with a number of other implements Sam didn’t want to look too hard at. “You realize, if this is just to keep yourself alive longer, I’m _gonna_ keep you alive longer.”

“So, there’s death here? Real death? Is Cas okay?” But Dean was already out the door—rough but solid wood, with the clunk of a beam on the other side suggesting a much more serious barrier than any mechanical lock would have been. Leaving all the blades in the room with him was an engraved invitation, no pun intended, for an escape attempt, but Sam didn’t know where he could go that was any safer, still felt like half-baked crap, and wanted to get Dean to believe in him as soon as possible, all of which argued for staying in place. Also, iron staples held the chair to the scuffed floor, so he didn’t rate his chances very high even if he tried. (Sam wondered how many people—monsters—whatever—Dean had talked to in this chair, and what it had done to him.)

One of the weirdest things about the room, he realized, was the light. There were no windows and no lamps. Instead there was just this flat illumination, going grey and hazy at the corners of his vision. But it wasn’t the hangover as he’d first thought; it was the way vision worked in Purgatory.

Sam had the feeling that the surprises weren’t going to get nicer.

“On the upside,” he said to the empty air, “now I know the spell works.” This wasn’t entirely accurate, since it had been _supposed_ to bring Dean out, not suck Sam in, but he was going to call being on the same plane of existence a win.

He didn’t know whether time moved at the same pace in Purgatory as in Hell. Dean had evidently integrated himself into some larger structure, but Dean could do that in twenty-four hours under appropriate conditions, particularly the battlefield ones Sam suspected applied here.

His soulless self had been good at waiting for prey, when he’d wanted to be. Sam, by contrast, got bored easily, and after he decided he didn’t want to know how the scuffs on the floor and the spatters on the walls had gotten there, and especially not whether Dean had been a causal factor, he started to fret. Half the reason he’d gotten hooked on Ruby’s blood and body, he sometimes thought, was that he didn’t know how to be alone with his own thoughts, especially once he’d failed to save Dean. 

Operation Save Dean 2.0 was still a work in progress, but as long as he hadn’t opened up the Purgatory-Earth barrier he was prepared to be optimistic.

A little abrasion, a little temporary dislocation and searing pain, and he managed to free first his left hand, then his right. He still had no plans to grab a weapon and try to fight his way out, but there was no reason he had to be trussed up. 

When he was stretching the pins and needles out of his calves, the door opened and he found himself staring down—Dean’s … _handheld crossbow_?

“Fuck you, guns don’t work here,” Dean grumbled, and at least he was reacting to Sam’s raised eyebrow as if he really was Sam.

Sam raised his hands and sat back down. 

“Cover me,” Dean ordered the person behind him, though Sam could see from the set of his shoulders that he wasn’t totally certain about his backup, as well he shouldn’t be since Sam was right in front of him—and it was Lenore.

“Hey!” Sam said brightly, because in Purgatory she had to count as a friendly face, even without being on Dean’s side.

Her worried expression didn’t change. Given what he’d heard right after he woke up, and Dean’s earlier accusation, he guessed she had good reason to suspect a Sam-shaped being.

Sam gripped the armrests tightly, trying to show good faith, and Dean approached.

“Dean, tell me you didn’t steal some little old lady’s bifocals to test me,” Sam said, looking down at the two-part lens. 

“A, she’s a witch, B, shut up.” Dean waved the thing around, then realized pretty much when Sam did that there was no real light source to give him any illuminating flashes, and then Sam had to wait while he fumbled for matches—they looked handmade, and stank like demon sweat, which was enough to make Sam’s unsteady stomach lurch badly. 

Eventually, ten matches and two burnt fingertips later, Dean conceded defeat, or maybe it was victory.

“Sam?” He didn’t meet Sam’s eyes. 

“Yeah, Dean.”

He really should have expected the punch.

While he was sprawled on the floor—no more appealing close up—Lenore looked at him sympathetically. “You two have some catching up to do. Welcome to Purgatory, Sam,” she said, and let herself out. (Sam thought she might not mind the idea of Sam suffering alongside the rest of them quite as much as Dean did, given the backstory.)

“Okay,” Sam began when the door closed, “I’ll give you that one. But I thought the spell might rescue you,” he explained, not defensive in any way at all. And I was really drunk, he added to himself, which Dean really ought to sympathize with but plainly wouldn’t. “And if you hit me again I’m gonna throw up on you.” He got up, carefully. “You want to tell me what’s going on around here? And where Cas is?”

“Patrol,” Dean said. “We keep this part of Purgatory under control, pretty much. But it’s dog eat dog mostly, or dog eat vampire, or whatever, and we get a lot of monsters testing the walls. Always gotta show them you’re the biggest badass in town. Cas turns out to be awesome at that, because he’s ‘over the God thing’”—Sam could tell this was a quote—“and he will do _anything_. Couple nights ago he caught this vampire trying to sneak into the compound—one of the non-veggie ones, I mean—and he, well,” obviously remembering that this was his morally squeamish younger brother he was talking to, “let’s just say you can still shock and awe a bunch of vamps and werewolves.” 

Sam nodded encouragingly, wanting more of the story. Especially wanting to know who this ‘we’ was, and whether there were more among them that the Winchesters had actually sent here. But Dean had other priorities. 

“How the fuck did you get here, anyway? Did you blow yourself up trying magic? ‘Cause I’m gonna kick your ass—”

Sam had wondered some, himself, whether he was Purgatory-bound like every other monster, so it wasn’t unreasonable for Dean to wonder, and the part of him that might once have been stung by Dean’s reasoning was long scarred over. He shook his head. “It was just another spell, Dean. I don’t even know why it was the one that worked.” (In fairness, he might’ve had a better memory for the details if he hadn’t been so loaded, but he hardly thought that was relevant.)

This was ridiculous, he decided; they hadn’t even had the customary ‘hey you’re not-dead/back from the dead’ hug, and he wasn’t wasting any more time.

Dean squeaked a little when Sam grabbed him, but after less than a second he was squeezing right back. He smelled pretty much the same as on Earth, leather and a fleshy, metallic note that wasn’t quite human blood. No alcohol on his breath, and if Purgatory had fixed _that_ Sam was prepared to settle down.

“I didn’t want you to be here,” Dean said into his ear, wistful.

“I know,” Sam acknowledged. Dean’s whole body was warm against him, not quite yielding—or at least Dean would never admit that he was letting _Sam_ hold _him_.

“Gettin’ a little weird here, Sammy,” Dean suggested after a minute. 

“Mmm,” Sam said, not exactly disagreeing. He let his hands drift down, holding Dean’s waist loosely, fingers drifting up under Dean’s shirt. “Shock and awe, hunh?”

“Sam,” Dean rasped, like it hurt, like he wanted it to keep hurting. 

“You remember that thing we stopped doing, because it’s wrong, because _we_ were wrong?”

Dean was shaking, just a little. Sam could feel the heat rising off his skin, see the sweat darkening the hair at his temples.

“Got you back,” Sam murmured, and that was the truth of it: no blood-drinking and angels of the Lord out to jumpstart the apocalypse in their way any more, no soullessness and Hellfire. Just them. “If you can’t sin in Purgatory—”

Dean pushed him away then, still caught in Sam’s arms but staring up at him, eyes wide, freckles faded from the absence of true sun. Still and always beautiful. “Tell me you didn’t come here for this. Give up Heaven for this.”

Second verse, same as the first. Sam lacked the energy to roll his eyes, but _he_ could be man enough to admit his own needs: “It’s not Heaven without you, Dean.”

A muscle twitched in Dean’s jaw. “You sure about that? ‘Cause I remember your Heaven looked pretty full of not-me.”

Sam breathed out through his nose and reminded himself that Dean’s issues were well-earned. “Our _soulbond_ just pulled me through the barrier between Earth and Purgatory. So, yeah. For you, Dean. You can bitch about it or you can deal.” He let Dean go—not ideal, but Dean sometimes did better when he could pretend he was just talking to himself instead of sharing. 

Sure enough, Dean stared at Sam’s shoulder, but he did talk, sort of. “You know—” he said, and Sam could finish that himself. I wanted something better for you; I even learned to want normal for a while; I’m still dragging you down with me. There was a point where he and Dean had crossed trajectories in the lives they dreamed for themselves. But that was all past.

“Is it so bad?” Sam asked. Yes, Dean and his crew (whoever that was) clearly fought for their lives (or whatever they had here) on a regular basis, but Sam didn’t see how that was different from hunting. Sure, they didn’t have a bunch of ignorant innocents to protect any more, but that was basically a plus as far as he was concerned. They’d failed at saving people often enough on Earth even when they saved the world.

Dean didn’t answer, but then Sam hadn’t expected him to, not in words anyway. Sam pulled him in again, hesitating before he brought his lips to Dean’s. They’d never done this in the world of the living, like that way handjobs and rubbing off on each other didn’t count. Dean’s lips were dry, but his mouth opened sweetly for Sam, and this, here, was Sam’s new world. 

Dean’s back hit the forgotten table, and some infernal device clattered to the floor. Sam would’ve been fine with sweeping it clean and pushing Dean down right there, but he could tell that his brother (the true romantic, as anyone watching him touch his car would’ve known) wanted better. Sam wasn’t going to argue over the details.

“Sam,” Dean said, mouth shining and swollen from Sam’s kisses. Purgatory was supposed to be a place of purification. This was as pure as they’d ever be. Sam kissed him again and let all his transgressions burn away.


End file.
